and shut up in a little space where it
could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish
of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the
solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning.

So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and
round in her cage of Kensington Gardens.

She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of
sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So
she hardened it.

She hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never
touched it, but against Nicky and Nina and Laura. Laura's face in August
had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look.
This face, the face of her friend, appeared to Jane like something seen
in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. But it
had no power to touch her. She had hardened her heart against everybody
she knew.

At last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the
dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living
grass and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was
beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things
pierced it with an unbearable pain. It was hard to the very babies in
the Gardens, where she walked.

One day she came upon a little boy running along the Broad Walk. The
little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a
steam-engine, so he ran his small body into Jane and upset it violently
at her feet. And Jane heard herself saying, "Why don't you look where
you're going?" in a voice as hard as her heart.

Then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. They were the eyes
that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. They held her
so that she did not stoop and pick him up. He picked himself up and ran
to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a
steam-engine, and he couldn't stop.

And Jane turned away across the grass and sat down under a tree, holding
her head high to keep her tears back, for they hurt. Her thoughts came
in a tumult, tender, passionate, incoherent, mixed with the child's
wail.

"I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. I mustn't care for George if
it makes me knock little boys down in their pretty play and be cruel to
them. I'll stop thinking about George this minute--I was a steam-engine
and I couldn't stop. No wonder he didn't care for me,